About a week ago, while just about everybody in the publishing and bookselling industry, and the reporters who cover them, was otherwise occupied at the Javits, NYT columnist Clyde Haberman, of all people, dug into the story of a book bannned at the Met gift shop. Seems that The Clarks of Cooperstown, a family history by Nicholas Fox Weber, ran afoul of certain sensibilities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is currently exhibiting an assortment of paintings collected by brothers Sterling and Stephen Clark (the latter of whom was a Met and MoMA trustee). Weber and his publisher, Knopf, had put the book together to a tight deadline, so it could be sold in the gift shop while this exhibit was running, only to find that it wasn’t there.
Was it because somebody at the museum was offended by the hints of homosexuality in Alfred Corning Clark’s life story? For Haberman’s article, the Met’s spokesman said, of course not; they were just trying to sell more copies of the exhibition catalog by not putting any competing books out on display for a while, and the book was in the store now, so what was the problem? But NY Sun reporter Kate Taylor dug into the story with the help of a disgruntled ex-employee, suggesting the Weber omission was meant to be permanent. Unfortunately, after that the story loses focus, splitting off into charges that the Met doesn’t want its bookstore employees to unionize, that they won’t carry books that trustees don’t like, and that they don’t like authors who say bad things about the museum or its trustees.